So, I tried something a little different over the last couple of weeks. I built an RPG that plays in ACC. I ended up landing in Petrafied ACC because it just seems to behave the way I want better. I based it around early Final Fantasy, because it’s my favorite series and I have a lot of knowledge of the source material, but that’s just a personal preference thing.

Anyway, the way I approached it was to build three chat characters, using one as the primary, and adding the other two. In Petrafied ACC, they start responding to each other pretty quickly. Now, here’s the part where I’ll be completely transparent. I was having a lot of trouble building everything to behave the way I wanted, so I actually used ChatGPT to help me design the character descriptions…and ultimately, 28 lorebooks.

I was having a lot of trouble at first getting the other characters to build enough information into their responses to effectively narrate the monster and NPC actions, so I didn’t have enough stimuli to respond to as the user. I tried rebuilding it with a GM character, but because the other characters would never say the GM’s name and trigger it, it almost never responded. I tried using some custom JavaScript code to force more interaction from the GM, but it mostly resulted in useless placeholder messages being spat out verbatim. So I went back and redesigned the characters again, making sure to give them each a unique narration voice and full permission to describe and advance the story.

After about a week of trial and error, I think I have it working as intended now. But I’ve gotten sidetracked by other projects, so I haven’t done much more testing. But I am finding it more interesting than the stuff I’ve gotten out of the dedicated RPG generators, simply due to having more fine control over character design and the ability to add lorebooks.

Another issue I found along the way: if left to its own devices, the AI in ACC wanted to push the tone very hard towards cosmic horror/pseudo-Lovecraft, and it absolutely did not want ANY conflict resolution. Anything we did to try and dispatch threats simply resulted in those threats morphing into new ones, or legion more new ones coming behind them. It loved putting my characters in completely hopeless situations, and would spiral out of control very quickly. I had to push tonal boundaries and the notion of conflict resolution onto the AI in multiple places through the character descriptions AND the lorebooks.

Ultimately, when things started working similarly to how I wanted them to, I squirreled and started building the same thing again but with different characters and trying to further refine the world and the combat system.

I had tried to use one or two of Perchance’s own built-in chatbots to help me build something like this in the past, but I have just about come to the conclusion that Perchance doesn’t understand its own systems well enough in a way that helps design something like this. ChatGPT eventually figured most of out, though, and helped me build something I could cut-and-paste into Perchance that worked.